Friday, September 22, 2006

The Learning Bubble

This will be my first attempt to try to explain an idea of mine which I will call the learning bubble. It is based on a number of ideas:
  • the human mind continually changes and this change includes the formation of new neuronal links, neurone regrowth and change, besides non-physical organisational changes
  • when it comes to learning it is the context that is important
  • nurture rather than nature
  • immersion - daily lived experience

The model of learning it attacks is that learning is something that accumulates over time i.e. as we get older we 'know' more or become more experienced...experience being interpreted as being better to deal with our current environment.

Within this model I perceive the individual as existing within a time bubble and it is the recent learning that is more relevant to that individual's experience. We can perhaps imagine a time bubble of about three years in size. This bubble contains within it a number of learning experiences which are more likely to be relevant to the current context of the individual. Taking Ericssons idea's of expertise, if the experiences are intense or immersive enough there can be significant changes in individuals.

Let's take a psychomotor example: learning a tune on a musical instrument. I may learn a tune off by heart but if I don't play it for a while, even a couple of weeks, it needs revision before I can play it. A short spell of revision may make it playable again...but it is the currency of playing and doing it that counts...it has to be almost there at your fingertips.

The other day I played my first squash game for a long time, years, and I have not really played a great deal since my early twenties. I can still play, I know the skills are still there but they are not as yet at anything like the level they were.....or are they all there, but dormant? Is it a question of re-working and re-jeuvenating synapses, neuronal channels etc. How much of my brain is the same as it was 20 years ago? In chemistry, information, structure? Am I indeed a different person?

These two examples are interesting reflections relating to largely, but not wholly, psychomotor skills. If I was to surround myself within a three year bubble of playing squash, playing regularly, how good would I get? Of course it all depends on the degree of immersion, social involvement and so on.

I see the bubble idea as fitting in strongly with the principles of life long learning...it's not so important what you did then (in the past, at school, university etc), it is what you do now that counts. I suggest in this way that it is possible for us all to become someone else to a certain extent.

DAY 19 - Not Much Progess

I have set aside 50 days to write a rough draft of my PhD. Unfortunately this attempt only really lasted a week before it petered out, and even in the first week I confined myself pretty much to reading and a bit of work trying to prepare drawings of hands. I did not really do any writing or analysis. I did however do some reading although the sum total of this would probably only be about 150 pages.

I feel that my aim of writing the the whole draft in this 50 days is too much and maybe Xmas is more realistic.

Juliette, my work colleague, said that I should just do a little each day but be consistent, especially when things are busy at work. I know this is the best advice on such issues, because a little bit every day eventually gets you there. Anyway all is not lost because I still have 31 days left, a whole month, so I will try to get back onto the conveyer belt. In the next weekI should really focus more on writing and analysis rather than reading perhaps. Well let's see how it goes.

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

DAY 2 - It's Hard to Draw a Hand

Day 2 of 50 - Writing the Draft of my PhD

Well, I haven’t finished all my reading today (5 pages short) and it feels like I have not done a lot else. I need to do my first visually displayed episode of the use of gesture by a teacher in explaining graphs. This has involved me having to draw a number of hands in different positions (mostly done previous to this 50 day effort). The way I did this was to copy the position of the hand adopted by the teacher with my own hand and then take a digital photograph of this position. I then imported the image into Paint Shop Pro (ver. 7). I then zoomed it to a largish size and using the paintbrush tool drew an outline of the hand…this was set as a new layer on top of the hand. I then copied this layer and reduced it in size to give a hand. This was quite a difficult process since it is fairly hard to trace a line with the mouse. I have so far drawn about 20+ different hand shapes. I will incorporate these shapes into the story of how the teacher explains the relationship between a time-distance graph that he has drawn on the board and the graph produced as a result of students attempting to emulate the graph with their own movement in front of a motion detector.





A word file containing the images of the hands may be obtained from the link below. The next step will be to tell the story as a kind of comic strip illustrating the hand movements and the teacher’s dialogue.

http://kn.open.ac.uk/public/document.cfm?documentid=8672

Friday, September 01, 2006

Writing a draft of my PhD

From Monday I am going to endeavour to write up the whole of my PhD in draft form. Am I ready for this? When is anyone ready?

The aim is to complete my PhD by the end of the first week in January or thereabouts.

I am going to allow myself 50 days for this process. This will also coincide with an intended period of abstinence from alcohol (this for a variety of reasons including getting my weight down).

At a 80 000 words (80 to 100 thousand being allowed for a PhD) this represents 1600 words a day.

I will also need to read during this period and expect this reading to take between 1.5 and 2 hours a day. I envisage the total number hours required to be of the order of 5 hours a day…giving a total of 250 hours, although more may be needed.

As part of my reading I wish to finish off Where Mathematics Comes From (Lakoff, Nunez, 2000) and Women Fire and Dangerous Things (Lakoff, 1987). In order to complete these within the first 30 days I would have to read 10 and 17 pages per day from each of these books respectively. I have another Lakoff book that I wish to read – Philosophy in the Flesh, or some such title….cannot remember.

The important thing about this process is that the PhD draft does not have to be good…it is a draft but something on which to work and build. Essentially there will be:

Reading
Analysis
Writing

At least I have already made a rough draft of the P chapter.